So how can I hope to ship more games this year than in the last 6 years combined? Well, these days it’s a lot easier to ship games on different platforms, and I’ve teamed up with other people who are porting my IP to some other platforms for me. Plus I’m used to localizing games now, so that’s no longer a big challenge. So far this year I’ve already shipped 17 SKUs as follows:

When I was at GDC I bumped into Arthur Humphrey (Last Day of Work) who said that he believed a good business strategy for indies was to ship many SKUs on different platforms and see which were most profitable. This gave me more confidence in what I was planning to do.

So here’s how I plan to ship 50+ this year:

- Very soon Spring Bonus will be out on Windows Phone 7 and iPad and soon after hopefully on iPhone and XBLIG = 4 SKUs
- Also I’m getting Spring Bonus translated to Japanese = 1 SKU
- If Spring Bonus does well on those platforms, the engine will be reused to ship Oz on all iPad/iPhone/WP7/XBLIG, plus I’m planning to localize it to 8 or 9 languages = 12 SKUs
- Then at the end of the year Holiday Bonus will ship on iPad/iPhone/WP7, and will also be localized to 8+ languages = 11 SKUs
- I’m planning on converting my framework to Linux so that I can ship Oz, Holiday bonus and Spring Bonus on Linux = 3 SKUs
- I started a mini-game for the recent Ludum Dare, but failed to finish it due to nice weather So I’ll ship that soon on PC/Mac = 2 SKUs
- I’m planning a Vancouver game jam in the summer, so that’ll be another mini-game on PC/Mac = 2 SKUs
- I’m working with a number of people as a design consultant/producer that will result in a bunch of shipped games on multiple platforms.
- I’d like to get some of my games ported to Flash, but that might not happen, we’ll see.
- I’ll definitely be making some brand new games and shipping on multiple platforms as well as localizing them.
- I’ll probably make some more mini-games

And that, my friends, is how I’ll do it! That’s another 35 planned SKUs plus some more in the pipeline.

I’ll keep reporting on my progress and will do a post-mortem at the end of the year, so stay tuned folks. Wish me luck!

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Just updated the post as I realized I’ve already localized Spring Bonus to 8 languages (it said 7). Also some of the other games said 8 languages, but actually it’s probably going to be 9 in some cases.

I have submitted the WP7 build of Spring Bonus to Microsoft so soon my SKUs will total 18, then the Japanese and iPad versions will boost that to 20, hopefully by the end of May.

I was thinking that the number of distinct technical platforms I’ve shipped games for are 6, and the number of sales platforms are 10 (if I lump all portals together), as follows: